Posts tagged ‘Mexico’

I’ve even numbered them (with small numbers, so they’re more easily understood); all they have to do is pick one!

Abolish the ATF. My personal favorite. If there’s no ATF, then there’s no agency to lean on FFL dealers and pressure them to sell guns to known straw purchasers against their will.

Defund the ATF. Cut them down to the bare minimum needed to process NFA paperwork, and they won’t be able to afford to pay the idiots who thought this plan was a good idea.

Appoint a special prosecutor to charge everyone person in the ATF and DOJ involved in Fast and Furious; if the people responsible for overseeing them can’t do their jobs, bring them up on charges and throw them in jail. Especially if they’re actively breaking the law instead of enforcing it.

The attorney general apparently did his damnedest to conflate Fast and Furious with Operation Wide Receiver (Andrew McCarthy goes into detail on how exactly the two programs differed (substantially, as it turnes out (for example, in Wide Receiver, ~350 guns were involved and the US had the cooperation of the Mexican government; in Fast and Furious, more than 2000 guns were involved, and the Mexican government was completely in the dark))).

By comparison, Mr. Holder and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, noted statistics showing that of the nearly 100,000 guns that were seized in Mexico and traced in recent years, about two-thirds originated in the United States.

Mr. Grassley said those numbers were “faulty” as a portrayal of the smuggling of weapons that had been sold in a retail store in the United States. They include weapons that had originally been sold to the Mexican military, weapons that were transferred into Mexico many years ago, Fast and Furious guns, and firearms from other sources, he said.

If anything about Fast and Furious was botched, it’s that this effort at under the radar gun control failed so spectacularly. If the ATF had had their way, they’d probably just use this as “proof” gun stores are arming the cartels and that we need more gun control to combat them. As it is, the ATF and DOJ look like incompetent fools and still are crying for more gun control.

“The bottom line is the gun lobby will oppose any nominee who promises to be a strong and effective director of the ATF,” said Dennis Henigan, vice president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “Fast and Furious is what happens when you don’t have a strong director,” he said.

Five months into the surveillance effort — dubbed Operation Fast and Furious — no indictments had been announced and no charges were immediately expected. Worse, the weapons had turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and the ATF official was worried that someone in the United States could be hurt next.

The LA Times goes on to give a bit of background information on Fast and Furious:

Fast and Furious was a highly secret undercover program begun with great ambition. The border was out of control, and the new Obama administration wanted to stop U.S. guns from crossing into Mexico and arming drug cartels.

I’m not sure if the article is an indictment of the operation or a cry for more funding for the ATF, especially with their claim that the only reason the ATF failed to track each weapon was because it didn’t have enough resources.

The piece does a pretty good job of highlighting the complete incompetence of the ATF at every step of Fast and Furious, from its conception to its implementation to the inevitable conclusion.

Even if it were lawful, it would probably be just as ineffective as the multiple hand gun purchase form was; the USA Today editorial begins with the story of a man who illegally purchased dozens of guns in AZ for resale in CA for two years before the he was finally caught.

As LaPierre points out:

The cartels run a $40 billion enterprise. They flood our neighborhoods with drugs. They rape and torture and murder. They feed their enemies to lions.

The cartels get their machine guns, grenades, missile launchers and tanks from Russia, China and South America. State Department cables, released byWikiLeaks, prove it. But the administration wants the public to believe that it’s going to disarm cartels with a form? Who is the president kidding?

“He was asking about the impact of Project Gunrunner to brief people in preparation for a trip to Mexico… what we were doing to combat firearms trafficking and other issues.”

Obviously Operation Fast and Furious only falls under that umbrella in the loosest definition of “combat firearms trafficking” you can come up with; as we’ve seen in the past couple of months, the ATF was more enabling firearms trafficking than actually combatting it. Hell, they were even letting convicted felons buy guns as part of this “program.”

And now Congress’s report has accused the ATF of arming Mexican cartels for war. When guns you allow to be sold to known straw purchasers take less than 24 hours to get from the point of sale to the scene of the crime, then your lame attempt to “combat firearms trafficking” isn’t working at all.

Heads are going to roll because of this. For many Mexicans and Americans living near the border, they already have.

So far ~122 guns of the more than 2000 “walked” into Mexico have turned up at crime scenes. Maybe the part of the operation that is “botched” is that the cartels actually used the guns instead of just calling the ATF to say, “Hey, we got those guns. You can start tracking them now.”

It’s getting to the point where Eric Holder can’t claim ignorance without looking like he’s beyond incompetent; if the ATF and the FBI were involved, and neither of them bothered informing their boss about the shady shit going down, then he ought to be fired for not keeping tabs on the agencies he’s responsible for. If he did know what was going on, then he ought to be fired not only for breaking the laws he’s supposed to enforce, but also trying to cover it up.